The humble way I'd love to see Settlers go core

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alhazred70 wrote:

This is exactly what I'm talking about. If you feel obligated to max your city every league then GGG didn't balance it correctly. (IMO)

How could they get the balancing right?


Its either profitable to do it, which means it will be considered mandatory or its not in which case it will be considered a waste of time.
Same applies to any other piece of content available in the game.


Sure, there will always be a handful of player enjoying the mechanic for what it is, regardless whether its profitable or not - same as any other mechanic.
But expecting or hoping that GGG stands a chance to balance it just right, where you wouldnt feel the need to do it but its also not a waste of time for the majority of players and not just a handful sounds a lot like wishful thinking to me.

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alhazred70 wrote:

can't fathom a scenario in which a league this well liked by all sorts of players doesn't end up core at some point. So with that said just my opinion but:

make the NPC's placeable in your HO. I'm not the first to suggest this by any means. Make the town objects placeable in HO...

change the lore to be more "gritty and dark" I don't know why our godslayer is subservient to some high fantasy king. Its fully out of place in POE and makes no sense at all. The lore could be changed to "low fantasy" smuggling, and racketeering. Which would have been a more fitting choice for the whole league IMO; but in any case is perfect to fit into something that happens in the players HO.

Balance the time/reward so that we don't feel obligated to always max our town. Otherwise this mechanic becomes obligatory every damn league.

Yes this means less rewarding than current (but thats kind of a given with past league mechanic integrations) I feel like presently the only people who do delve or Heist for example are people who enjoy it because those mechanics are highly sub-optimal and not at all obligatory. The town progression should aim for this as well IMO.

Exactly, if Kingsmarch goes core "as is", it will either feel mandatory for anyone that is concerned with currency generation, or it will be so nerfed that no one does it.

However, this is not the same with every mechanic. Other mechanics require you to be actively engaged to profit, making it a this/that decision. Kingsmarch is the only mechanic with the ability to passively generate wealth while engaging in other mechanics. making it a this/and decision.

I dont see why leveling up the town is such a problem. It is all done pretty passively (gold is auto-pickup, there are no atlas passive points, ores are worth clicking on for their other effects anyway)


But I also don't think it will go core "as is". I would expect to see faustus go core, and the rest to go away. Gold will either stay for faustus only, or be deleted and replaced with some kind of new exchange limiter to prevent bots/price fixers.

Personally, I would like to see the solution be a hard cap on currency exchange usage per day. Leave the current weights in places, so that different trades cost different amounts, based loosely on value of item total, but give everyone a daily allowance of "gold" or exchange points to use for the trades. This would do an even better job than the current gold system of preventing arbitrage/flipping and price fixing.

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Orbaal wrote:

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alhazred70 wrote:

This is exactly what I'm talking about. If you feel obligated to max your city every league then GGG didn't balance it correctly. (IMO)

How could they get the balancing right?


Its either profitable to do it, which means it will be considered mandatory or its not in which case it will be considered a waste of time.
Same applies to any other piece of content available in the game.


Sure, there will always be a handful of player enjoying the mechanic for what it is, regardless whether its profitable or not - same as any other mechanic.
But expecting or hoping that GGG stands a chance to balance it just right, where you wouldnt feel the need to do it but its also not a waste of time for the majority of players and not just a handful sounds a lot like wishful thinking to me.

Well thats the thing, if its sub optimal (ideally not by a large amount) then people will do the mechanic when they want to and not feel pressed. This means the people who enjoy it will do it more than the people who hate it, generating less "push back".

My examples are Heist and Delve which are arguably under tuned and thus "side content". And yet there's a counter opinion defending both those mechanics in this thread; that suggests those mechanics are close. AKA balanced pretty okay.

Personally as a Delve lover I think Delve could use a buff like deleting sulphite (considering its missing so much content anyway I don't think this is as crazy as it sounds). but hey at least it doesn't feel obligatory. I think Heist could revert a little bit back to when things were a little more deterministic; but as we all know, if Ben_ or one of the other mega sweats can turn any bit of deterministic rewards into an advantage it'll be abused then nerfed for everyone who just plays normally in short order.

What I don't want to see is a Harvest situation, where crafting on imperfect ground loot to make good bridge gear literally FIXED ground loot, made you want to pick up rares and care about the loot drops for longer. until the sweats ruined it and it got the famous GGG triple tap... twice IIRC a double triple tap? Sextupletap? whatever.

This savaging re-broke the gameplay loop until Recombinators... which were also too abused by the sweats due to their balance point being ludicrous (working on too many optimal item use cases)... and thus taken away... Until Settlers. I'm sure you see where I'm going with this.

So yeah my plea to GGG is try and balance this new content in such a way that it doesn't need to be gutted for the 99% because of the abuse of 1%. If town-maxing is part of an optimal mapping strategy it will need to be gutted in short order. Which usually translates to being made insanely thirsty for your time and effort.

I happen to love meta progression systems in games (which is what Settlers is and to an extent also Delve/Atlas/Heist and such) going back as far as "Chainmail" rule book in OD&D. And I also really enjoy POE more when ground loot part of the gameplay loop isn't busted. needless to say Settlers having both of these is my all time banger I think.

Personally i think its good to invest in a mechanic to get the full benefit as i feel it drives diversity in the economy and might be one of the elements keeping the game afloat.

Someone mentioned in a post about these things feeling mandatory and that definitely is something i'd like GGG to avoid because when something feels mandatory that hurts the diversity and lowers the profits we all tend to make should we invest in a particular mechanic and it be meta so to speak.

GGG has done pretty well navigating this and settlers was bound to ruffle some feathers being so drastically differient from the traditional experience but if its allowed to stay i think it will only increase player engagement for a wider audience.

It does suck when a mechanic simply isn't interesting for you however at the very least we have a good amount of options.


On settlers personally i would like to see it that you can not fully max every aspect of your town and must specialize to some extent, this might rub a lot of people the wrong way however so ill just leave that at that lol.

Kingsmarch should go fully developed but what player need to care are workers and mechanics present in town.

One can use whatever mechanic one want if not - dont.

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alhazred70 wrote:

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TayPoE wrote:

This league should only go core if I don´t have to build every season a City Sim
to use it. Its just boring to build up the whole town every season and doesn´t fit this genre.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. If you feel obligated to max your city every league then GGG didn't balance it correctly. (IMO)

I´m not talking about feeling obligated to do so, it would be just hilarious to think to do this every season. Same like it would be hilarious to build the whole harvest construction before using it. I don´t have FOMO with this mechanic i didn´t do it for weeks without any issues.

My point is it would be a big miss if this goes core as it is right now.

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TayPoE wrote:

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alhazred70 wrote:

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TayPoE wrote:

This league should only go core if I don´t have to build every season a City Sim
to use it. Its just boring to build up the whole town every season and doesn´t fit this genre.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. If you feel obligated to max your city every league then GGG didn't balance it correctly. (IMO)

I´m not talking about feeling obligated to do so, it would be just hilarious to think to do this every season. Same like it would be hilarious to build the whole harvest construction before using it. I don´t have FOMO with this mechanic i didn´t do it for weeks without any issues.

My point is it would be a big miss if this goes core as it is right now.

Personally i really liked the original harvest setup and investing time into the garden ensured that one could not simply swap their atlas passive tree and dominate the mechanic without first working their way up a bit.

Here's my stipulations: If we get Kingsmarch or Faustus, it's because gold goes core. And by that logic, Kingsmarch needs to be a gold sink, not a source of profits that competes with any other place. And gold needs to be relatively rare for the end profits not to compete with other sources.

Everybody probably already knows gold is supposed to be the credential of player activity, so it can be used for personal gains for alts and trading. Besides that Gold can offer other forms of rewards for an individual that accumulates much of it, like respec points or gambling. These do not need to be cheap for the end game, but can be cheap before that to encourage alts and beginners.

Kingsmarch would need changes. First of all, while building it was fun, it would suck to build it every league. Thus, I would make it so you have a shared Kingsmarch in each game mode, as in SC, HC, SSF, HCSSF, Ruthless SSF and so on. No differentiating between Standard and League, so the one you build in Standard SC can be continued in League SC. Personally I would make building it so expensive, that we could continue building it for several leagues before it's completed.

Second Kingsmarch change assumes we are going to keep building materials: Blacksmith does the gambling, not Faustus. The building materials have sinks in the form of blacksmithing and shipping, which are both forms of gambling, and building upgrades, alongside gold costs. In the other case where we do not keep building materials, gold is the solution for all.

Third change makes it so that Faustus needs to be upgraded to grant both trade and shipping. No to either before you make an investment on him.

Besides these, Kingsmarch needs not to be time sensitive. As in, it should probably not have hourly shippings or mappers, but rather 1 shipping per day at the shortest, or trading slots needs to be limited by shipping frequency. I dunno.

In short, these are my stipulations, and in no way a truth, and I do not know what the new upgrades would be like. But I would like to have Kingsmarch as a gold sink, introductionary to trade, a stepping stone in bots way, and as something to look forward to between leagues.

How about this? Just let Settlers go to Standard as is, with all achievements and development accomplished in the league. Then nobody has to worry about FOMO compelling them to use it in future temp leagues. =^[.]^=